36:46
I've played it and after I after you see this trailer, I think you're going to want to as well. Welcome to Highguard. The bizarre disappearance of Highguard has finally been solved. The game released and what have we all learned? Well, Highguard. High God, are you mad? It's better than playing Concord. Truly the highest of praise. Highguard is one of the most painfully average video games I've ever played. And it's rather tragic because I feel like it has a very solid foundation, but it launched in a state that's like pre-alpha. Is there like a progression? Do I have a level? No. What the [__] The more I think about Highguard, the more I try to analyze it, the more insight I will go. So follow
me on this journey of insanity. You really are crazy. I think the best way to describe this game is to imagine you are cooking a potato in your oven. You set the timer and the temperature. Time passes. You take it out, add some cheese, a little bit of sour cream, chives, pepper, and spices. You take that first bite out of that baked potato, and oh boy, it tastes like heaven. Some good [__] savory. You dig in for the second bite, and it's raw. [__] RAW. WHAT THE [__] IS going on? You set aside your knife and fork, hold your head in your hands, and ask yourself, "How did I [__] up a baked potato?" That is Highguard in a
nutshell. It is a halfbaked potato where the first bite might taste really good, but clearly it wasn't cooked all the way. Now, baking a potato is pretty self-explanatory. I mean, there's there's one ingredient. You just heat it up. And you would assume someone who fails at this kind of task has never cooked any food in their life. But that's not true for the Highguard developers at Wildlife Entertainment. This game was given the premier spot at the game awards. They bragged that the game was being made by the creators of Titanfall and Apex Legends that they have since removed from the game Steam page. I don't know. It's never a good
sign when people don't want to take credit for things that they've worked on. Wildlife Entertainment seems to have solid experience, at least on paper, with creating games that people love, which makes HighG Guard's success and its shortcomings all the more baffling. Now, I might get some real hater guards in the comments for saying this, but there were times where High Guard felt like a genuine 10 out of 10 game. And I'm not exaggerating. I'm going fre mode. I went mode. All right. Planted that. I killed two of them. I got one. Yeah, I got a sick sniper. Nice. Get him. He's mine.
Oh [__] Something just blew up. Got him. Dude, why are we locking in for high guard right now? Oh, he's trying to diffuse. you live. Oh, baby, that's the way it's done. Peak guard. Beat Guard is back. There is something to this game and its formula that could be so much better, so much more. It could be the next big game. It's just not fully realized. But, you know, when you're playing a random hero shooter with four of your buddies and all five of you just kind of automatically lock in, you know, and you're actually trying and you're competing and you're having a blast. Like, there's something
there. But these incredible moments were contrasted with a very painful revelations. Let's just say High Guard is one of those firsterson shooters that doesn't have a scoreboard. And somehow it's worse than 2042. But like I said, if I talk too much about this game, I will go insane. We'll we'll cover that later. But this truly is the era of modern gaming where stats and important information in a competitive shooter are hidden from the player for reasons. Oh, right [__] in front. One more. Yeah. See, I don't know who's alive and who's dead on their team. You know what I mean? But what makes Highguard so painfully average, so exceptionally mediocre, so minimally exceptional.
Will the game die off similar to Concord? I hope not. But back to Concord. I mean, Highcord. I mean, God, I mean, Highguard [__] So, Highguard is like a rage shooter, which means you go out into the world in these maps, you gather resources, collect weapons, armor, upgrades, and then you take all of that equipment into a fight against the enemy, and you try to raid the enemy base using the shield breaker to break down their wall. And then it becomes a match of like demolition, which is really cool. It's a very unique concept and you got to give High Guard props for that. Okay, we're going to praise this game for right now, but you're not getting away that easy. The gunplay, the weapons, and
the movement is spectacular. I mean, fundamentally, this is a very solid game that is fun to play, and it's fun to shoot people and get kills. Oh, I got his ass. Hell yeah. The added element of like horse combat is also really cool and neat. Oh my god, he dismounted me. And like I said, there are very few games where I genuinely lock in and try to play as competitively as possible. But I did that with Highguard, even within the first 2 to 3 hours of playing it. This game has an incredibly solid foundation, but there is nothing built on top of that. It is a game that should be in early access. I don't know
why they didn't give it the deadlock treatment, but when you say your game is in early access and it's free and there's no microtransactions, well, Valve can get away with that because they make shitloads of money. So, I get why Highgard can't do that. But if you just labeled this game as early access or in open beta, closed beta, whatever, I think people would have been a lot more accepting of it. It's impossible to talk about Highguard without mentioning how it was revealed to the world on the biggest stage in gaming. It was shown to an audience of 4.4 million concurrent viewers who watched the Game Awards and overall a total viewer base of 171 million. But as the ultimate reveal to
the Game Awards to close it out, this trailer was handpicked by Jeff Keley himself. This game apparently didn't even pay for this spot. It's just Jeff loved the game that much. Welcome to High Guard. Hey, that really sucked. And you know, you can't blame a guy for enjoying something. I love Jeff Keley. I think he does wonders for the industry. So, it's like Highguard isn't a game that you should hate. It's a game you can make fun of because of like how bizarre it's designed. But regardless, this game was exposed to the largest audience possible. And then the developers went radio silent.
Well, we're waiting. They didn't even post a video explaining what Hide Guard was, how the game is played, what type of weapons there are, how do the maps work, why should you play this? It was a bizarre turn of events. People were saying they were going to shadow drop High Guard, but like, how can you shadow drop a game that you already revealed? And it also begs the question, why was this trailer prepped to be slotted in at the end of the game awards when it felt like there were so many other trailers worthy of that spot, more worthy of that spot? I think the way it was shown to the world, it did not earn any favors and it only earned mockery.
Look at the top of his head. You'd also think a trailer showcasing a brand new IP and a different kind of game would serve more as an explanation of like what the [__] is High Guard? Where does this take place in the world of Midgard? Guardian, you're not playing High Guard and that means you're not having fun. This trailer came across like every other generic hero shooter out there. Although on the plus side, you can equip three guns and when you're shooting, you're having fun. But it certainly didn't help that Jeff Key literally did the meme and overhyped this game to oblivion. Man, this is [__] mint. Here's the thing. High guard is nowhere near being a complete video game. It is free, but there's one game mode, five
maps. They built a road. They built a very good road, but there's nothing to see on it. So, if you like Highguard, you have to like driving and nothing else but driving. This game isn't even close to being finished. It's It's not really in an acceptable state. I cannot fathom why you would shadow drop a game that is so incomplete. You can tell because they immediately added a 5v5 mode like within a week of launching the game. Otherwise, it only had a 3v3 mode. And that's great. That shows initiative that they're willing to adapt to consumer demands. But it's like, why didn't you have that at launch? That's why it works for 3v3, but 5v5 has too many early skirmishes to keep it that fair gameplay loop for everybody.
Yeah. See, that's great and all, but 5v5 is better cuz I said so. OH. OH, I GET IT NOW. I think it's a good thing that they responded to criticism like that, but it's also incredibly worrying that they didn't anticipate that type of criticism. And so, the Highguard developers went awall until the game came out. And it's like, who would have thought that having no marketing strategy would have been a bad marketing strategy? It's like join a multiplayer match and then immediately go on AFK. Okay, wait. I'm back. Great first place. What? [__] It's over, team. We lost this location. Oh, so when you play Zerg and Starcraft, what's your build order?
Nothing. I don't build anything. You don't do you build drones to mine resources? No. I don't build anything. That's what it feels like. I mean, if you try searching High Guard on Twitter, the official account doesn't even show up. It's just a bunch of people making fun of Highguard, man. The same thing happens with YouTube. You search Highguard, not even their channel shows up. It's like, is there an orb of confusion near me or something? I checked out their channel. They posted 40 videos in 5 days calling all marketing managers, all people with marketing degrees, anyone with marketing experience. I am baffled, befuddled, and bamboozled. Please help me understand what the strategy here was. Posting 40
videos in 5 days. I just post a comment, please, for the love of God. What do you think their strategy was? Do you think this was some giant [__] Why would they? Welcome to Highguard. True to its marketing, Highguard is indeed a new breed of shooter, one that uh is beyond comprehension. Why does the game start off with a 15-minute mandatory unskipable tutorial? I don't need to learn to play. Oh, wait. I guess I [__] Oh, we have to leave or you can't do it. Wait, do we have to do the [__] tutorial? We can't do it together. Nope. Oh, boy. You know, when I was playing this game, I got 10 minutes into the tutorial and I thought to myself, do
I really want to make this video? I almost quit. And I'm not the only one because only 73% of people who have played Highguard have completed the tutorial. Like just let people discover if they enjoy the game and want to play it or not. It I mean it doesn't take a genius to figure out why people are quitting. But this mandatory 15-minute tutorial is just one of many in a long, long list of incomprehensible design choices. What's also incomprehensible is why the maps in Highguard feel as big as like a Halo 5 War Zone map, but there's no AI and the player count was intended to be six. Now, it is fun like reinforcing your base. It's very like surface level. You kind of wish you
could build turrets, build structures, maybe craft some forts or fort some mines, you know, that sort of thing. I was really looking forward to the sort of realtime strategy FPS combo hybrid that this game looked like it was offering, but it's it's such a surface level mechanic that it really doesn't do enough to stand out. One of the biggest problems is that the maps are so empty and all you do is just kind of like hit rocks with an axe, you know, an open chest and it just feels like there should be minions pushing through lanes. There's three lanes on all the maps. There should be creeps to fight for, I don't know, extra gold or, you know, something to risk going out there and
going out into certain parts of the map. But when every match starts with essentially 2 and 1/2 minutes of nothing, like resource gathering and base building, it really kills the momentum. While it is kind of fun to maximize how efficient you can gather resources to buy upgrades later on and better gear, there's no thought or challenge at all to it. There's no risk unless you run into an enemy team. I feel like what upsets me about high guard is that I truly see the potential. RTS and FPS is a genre that is basically dead non-existent. There are very few games that have successfully combined those two genres into something spectacular. Renegade X, Command and Conquer Renegade. I'll throw some gameplay up on screen, but it is
exactly what it sounds. First person shooter, third person shooter meets real-time strategy, base building, repairing, destroying. It's so [__] fun. And I thought this might be a more modern interpretation of that, but it's not. I feel like I'm Elsa Schneider, reaching for the Holy Grail. I see the greatness. It's I can just barely touch it, but if I keep trying to grab it, I'm going to fall into the abyss. Now, maybe I have a more positive view on this game to a certain degree because I never played Apex Legends. Yeah. All right. Throw your tomatoes. I deserve it. I may not have played Apex Legends, but you know what I have done? I've beaten Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door eight times. So, I got that going for me. Now, here's the
part where we have to take a dump on Highguard. You know, I'm not normally one for hyperbole, but HighG Guard is basically the 9/11 of user interfaces, and it's one of those games where I have to complain about the UI and the lack of a scoreboard. It's it's that type of game. Like, you see, everyone reacted positively to the removal of the scoreboard in 2042. Dice, how do I look at the scoreboard? Yet somehow High Guard is even worse about it because they don't even have a name list. Okay. Uh why? But why do they got to do just the symbols like just say kills and how many deaths did I have? It doesn't show deaths. Ah, it's one of
those games. Let's just get one thing clear. This is a game that is meant to be played competitively. Not like hardcore, but like I said, you play this. I played it. Me and my buddies, we locked in just naturally. This is a competitive game and you cannot see the enemy team. You can't see their names. This is a hero shooter. You can't see what heroes they are. You can't see their death timers if they've been revived. It's pretty [__] essential information for a game like this if you want to actually try to take it to that next level, be competitive, and be good at the game. This game has a staggering lack of important information. And then it's just like the devs are like, "Fuck
you." You know, there's no stats screen. There's like kills and revives, no assists, though. They don't They show assists in gameplay, but not in the end screen. It's just It's baffling. Like I said, if I talk about it too much, I will go insane. I'd sum it up like this, okay? You're watching a football game and you're like, "Oh, how many yards does Sam Darnold have?" And the NFL is like, "Nope, nope. You don't get to know that information. You don't get to know how many touchdowns he's thrown, how many interceptions he's thrown, how many sacks he's taken, how many yards he's rushed for. Probably like two. Sam Darnold doesn't rush a lot. You don't get to know how many passing yards
he has. You don't get jack [__] And compared to another MOA like Deadlock or League of Legends, which has all the information and helpful stats to inform you of how you're playing, if you're doing well, if you're not doing well, who's the star player, do you need to look out for them? Do you need to avoid them? What hero are they playing? Does that indicate that the hero they're playing is powerful or strong? All this information is just missing. It is the most casual hardcore competitive game ever made, I think. What kind of hero shooter is this where you have to memorize the respawns of the enemy team? Because you can't just see that on screen. You can't just pull up tab and
see the names of your opponents. You only get to see the names of your opponents when they kill you. I It is It is beyond bizarre. Can you imagine playing Overwatch or Marvel Rivals and you can't see what [__] heroes you're playing against? You can't see if they swap off them there. There's no element of counterplay. You can't anticipate or prep for the enemy team's composition. You are expected to memorize every single bit of important information in this game. And that just that [__] sucks. The fact that the most rudimentary, basic, expected, industry standard quality of life features are nowhere to be found in this game is just
jaw-dropping. And so as a result of this, no matter how much fun you have playing a match, maybe you feel like you're kicking ass or maybe you feel like you didn't do that great, at the end of every match, I was left with this like hollow empty feeling because I didn't know if I played well or like [__] There wasn't any information given to me. No MVP, no like career best kills, eliminations. They have a stat for walls destroyed but not walls reinforced. They have a stat for revives but not assists. What? So even if you try to be like a support player who doesn't shine in the limelight and get a whole a [__] ton of
kills, you got nothing to show for it. Yeah. What were you guys doing? I sniped one. Wait, wait. How much damage are you doing? Lots. I did lots. Well, actually, I don't [__] know actually cuz it didn't tell me. You don't get to know any of the important information that makes these games worth playing that makes you want to improve. How much damage did I do? Did I get any headshot kills? I don't know. Is the concept of stats like so offensive that people would be upset by the number of assists that they had? Like I This is also besides the fact that the main menu is hilariously bad. I mean, you got this ranked playlist mode that's
just says coming soon, and the game has already lost like 90% of its player base. So, uh, you're going to launch a ranked playlist with a game that has lost 90% of its player base. Yeah, that's not going to happen, mate. It looks like they were going for a similar menu layout to Arc Raiders, but like there's nothing going on here. One of these is like seven challenges and another is skins and they have [__] high guard coins. I find that so hilarious. No high guard gold. The main menu sucks. There's nothing to do here. There's no progression system. There's no levels. There's no lifetime stats.
There's no stats tracked at all. There's no reason to keep playing this game unless you love it and you love driving on a road with nothing to see on it. I almost forgot that you can't even ping things on the map. Just imagine if you couldn't ping in Arc Raiders, in PUBG, in War Zone, League of Legends, Dota, if you just couldn't ping on the map, you just had to verbally communicate that with your team like, "Go here, go here, go here, follow me, follow me." They made a competitive game without any features that allow players to play competitively. I do find it funny that the Highguard developers said it doesn't matter if the game reaches 1,000 players or 100 million. Well, it
does matter if you plan on launching a ranked game mode where you need a larger player base to support healthy ranked play and multiple ranks. But I digress. Highguard is a game that's like an amalgamation of eight different other games, but it doesn't fully embrace any sort of identity. It's it's rather basic. And though the foundation is strong, there is nothing to keep you playing. I could continue complaining about things like how this magnum has an 18 round chamber when it's upgraded and you know there's six chambers in a revolver. I don't know if you knew that.
You remember when you upgraded your pistol and Bioshock and it added like a big thing on the side with a bunch of extra bullets and stuff and that lets you know as a player like, "Oh, I can shoot more bullets before reloading." Yeah, remember that? It's like all these little details break my immersion for no discernable reason. I don't know why this game was launched or released and sold as if it was complete. It's not nearly complete. And that's completely besides the fact that when you launch the game, it doesn't even start with a cutscene. Nothing to introduce you to the world of Midgard, guard, high guard, nothing. Where are we? Who are these characters? Should
I care? Why are they fighting each other? What's going on? Nope. Just like the scoreboard, you don't get to know that information because it doesn't matter. Well, if that information doesn't matter to the developers, then it doesn't matter to me, and the game doesn't really matter. I think Highguard is a case of tragic mediocrity. It's a game that has seemingly endless potential that I could sit here for the next half hour talk about ideas I'd like to see in this game that likely will never be fully realized. And the developers seemingly have no intent on capitalizing on this game, but I really hope they prove me and this entire video wrong. The bizarre marketing campaign only furthered negative opinions of the
game and how it was shown to people in the most generic trailer on the biggest spotlight in gaming just really didn't give it good publicity. It gave it publicity, but not all publicity is good publicity. There is virtually no reason to play High Guard over Arc Raiders. Ark actually has PvE in it. It's much more exciting and thrilling. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic world and yet that world feels less empty and more realized than Highguard. I Highguard has this bizarre art style of like steampunk high fantasy sci-fi. The game is virtually unescribable. But despite all of that and despite all of the negativity and bad things I might have said about it, like the foundation is really strong. I
don't just lock in for any game and I locked in for this one. So, there's something there. Could be Highguard is a road that leads us to the promised land or it could just be an empty road that leads nowhere. Not even the Carrion eaters are interested in your radiated corpse. I guess time will tell and we'll find out one way or another. But what do you think? Have you played Midgard? Leave your thoughts and opinions in the comments below. Like the video if you enjoyed it and subscribe to the ActMan for more awesome content. All right, Guardians. That's all I got for today. This is the High God Man signing out.
Guardian.
